CFP DEADLINE EXTENDED APRIL 3: Policy Implementation as an Instrument to Achieve Educational Equity in the Community College Context

Call for Papers:

Policy Implementation as an Instrument to Achieve Educational Equity in the Community College Context

Guest Editors: Eric R. Felix (San Diego State University) and H. Kenny Nienhusser (University of Connecticut)

Topics: Education Policy Implementation; Educational Equity; Community College

            Education Policy Analysis Archives calls for papers for a special issue that examines the role of policy implementation in the community college context and the ways reforms are enacted to achieve educational equity. Often considered the “open-access sector” of public higher education, community colleges continue to grapple with ways to advance educational equity.

Policy reforms have served as a primary vehicle for federal-, state-, system-, and institutional-level actors to craft and formulate initiatives that address pressing educational concerns in the community college context. In recent years, several initiatives have been developed to improve outcomes in community colleges. These include reforms addressing the barriers of basic skills (e.g., placement practices, co-requisite courses), improving the transfer process (e.g., guaranteed transfer degrees), transforming the ways academic and student services are provided (e.g., guided pathways), and revising funding mechanisms to provide greater access to underserved populations (e.g., racially/ethnically minoritized, low-income, rural, undocu/DACAmented).

Scholarship included in the special issue centers policy implementation within the community college context: how implementers think of policy and its intended change (e.g., individual sensemaking), the role institutional context plays (e.g., campus culture), sociopolitical environments, and the ability to achieve more equitable outcomes through policy reform. Reviewing recent studies on policy implementation, there is a clear need to understanding the multifarious factors underlying the process of implementing policies seeking complex change (Nienhusser, 2018). This special issue will build on research examining the role of contexts and how they shape the process of implementation seeking to understand the dynamics that facilitate, restrict, and at times compromise, the efforts of individual actors seeking to achieve greater educational equity (Koyama, 2015).

As a whole, we seek theoretical and empirical submissions that highlight the myriad ways policies seeking more equitable outcomes in the community college sector are understood, responded to, and enacted by implementers. The papers included will cover a breadth of critical contemporary topics that community colleges are grappling with while using a variety of methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives.

References

Koyama, J. (2015). When things come undone: The promise of dissembling education policy. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(4), 548-559. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 01596306.2015.977012

Nienhusser, H. K. (2018). Higher education institutional agents as policy implementers: The case of policies that affect undocumented and DACAmented students. The Review of Higher Education, 41(3), 423-453. https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.2018.0014

About the Journal: EPAA/AAPE is a peer-reviewed, open-access, international, multilingual, and multidisciplinary journal designed for researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and development analysts concerned with education policies. EPAA/AAPE accepts unpublished original manuscripts in English, Spanish and Portuguese without restriction as to conceptual and methodological perspectives, time or place.

Submission Information/Timeline: Interested contributors are invited to submit 300-500 word abstracts aligned with the special issue theme for review by April 3, 2020. All abstracts should be submitted electronically through the EPAA website and follow the Journal’s submission guidelines at http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/.

Full manuscript invitations: late April, 2020

Full manuscript deadline: July 10, 2020

Editorial decisions: mid-September 2020

Final decisions: early December 2020

Publication date: January 2021

Please direct questions regarding this special issue to the guest co-editors:

Eric R. Felix, PhD, San Diego State University, efelix@sdsu.edu

H. Kenny Nienhusser, EdD, University of Connecticut, kenny.nienhusser@uconn.edu